Innehållsförteckning för March/April 2022 från The Texas Observer

Hi folks, you probably aren’t familiar with my name, but for the last six months I’ve been serving as the Texas Observ er’s interim editor in chief. While our organization undergoes strategic changes, it has been an honor to work for the state’s flagship progressive publication. Though I’m new to Texas, I believe the Observer’s voice is more critical than ever. I’m proud to present to you this issue. In these pages, you’ll find the deep-dive, investigative reporting you have come to expect from us: A heartrending story from contributor Olivia Gentile about a grandmother fighting the family of her daughter’s killer for custody—a testament to Texas’ broken parental laws, which play into the hands of domestic abusers. Associate Editor Christopher Collins examines the GOP’s decades-long assault on public education. And Senior…

27 The number of times Governor Greg Abbott said “Trump” in a January speech that lasted six minutes at a Montgomery County rally for the former president, according to the Houston Chronicle. Abbott was fending off two far-right primary challengers. 67% The portion of Republican primary voters who chose Abbott in March. He now heads for a November showdown against Democrat Beto O’Rourke, in which Abbott is heavily favored. 49 O’Rourke’s age and the ordinal number he’d occupy in the history of Texas governors. Unrelatedly, 49 is also the percent of the vote that incumbent state House member Stephanie Klick, R-Fort Worth, drew in the March primary. Klick, who is anti-abortion, will face off in a May runoff against David Lowe, a man who is even more anti-abortion. ONE HALF…

Jason Featherston was in the final month of his 25-year career in the Texas Army National Guard when he heard the news. A text message: John “Kenny” Crutcher, a 45-year-old sergeant in the Guard, had died by suicide on November 12, 2021, leaving behind a wife and young daughter. “It’s still a shock,” Featherston says. “I think it just goes to prove everybody can be susceptible in the right circumstances, but it’s hard to believe.” Crutcher, a North Texas native, was an “outstanding” soldier and infantry instructor, Featherston says. He suffered from post-traumatic stress from his military service in Afghanistan, according to his wife, but another factor at the time of his death was a military excursion closer to home: Operation Lone Star, Governor Greg Abbott’s massive, problem-plagued, and possibly…

Born and raised in Beaumont, Darrell Kyle first started working for ExxonMobil in the 1990s at the blending and packaging plant, which produces Mobil 1 motor oil. It’s part of the company’s sprawling refinery complex that sits on the banks of the Neches River next to Beaumont’s historic Black neighborhood Charlton Pollard. He became an active member of a labor union—Local 13-243—that’s represented refinery workers there since World War II. It’s now a part of the United Steelworkers (USW), an amalgamated industrial union that represents more than 30,000 refinery and petrochemical workers in the United States. The 55-year-old worked his way up through the ranks from shop steward to top leadership, getting elected president in 2015. With a gravelly drawl and a healthy dose of colorful fourletter words, the union…

An oxidized bronze statue of Tomás Sánchez, the founder of the binational metropolis of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, gazed upon the Presidencia Municipal on a warm sunny day in mid-December. Inside the building, Victor Treviño, one of Sánchez’s 10th-generation descendants and Laredo’s health authority, accepted the key to the city of Nuevo Laredo from Mayor Carmen Lilia Canturosas for his efforts to obtain and distribute free COVID-19 vaccines for its residents. The recognition was bittersweet for Treviño. “It took a lot of effort founding these cities,” he said as he crossed the international bridge toward Mexico shortly before the ceremony. “Though Nuevo Laredo is another country now, the people are still the same. Now the bridge is open, and we need to vaccinate as many people as…

In 2014, under the pall of fraud allegations, then–state Senator Ken Paxton hauled in just under 45 percent of the GOP primary vote as he secured first place against a pair of establishment-aligned opponents in his bid for Texas attorney general. The third-place finisher endorsed the runner-up in the runoff, citing concerns about Paxton’s emerging ethical challenges. “The attorney general must have integrity, honesty, and high moral character,” Barry Smitherman said in his endorsement of state Representative Dan Branch. But in a year of antiestablishment tea party fervor among the party’s base, Paxton’s pledge to continue then–Attorney General Greg Abbott’s legacy of using the office as a perch to sue then-President Barack Obama was enough to win. In the 2014 runoff, Paxton—buoyed by a $1 million loan from a new right-wing…

Nina Perales has been a civil rights attorney in Texas for 26 years, during which she has litigated two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases against the state’s efforts to disenfranchise Latino voters through redistricting. She currently oversees several voting-rights lawsuits across the nation, challenging voter suppression as vice president of litigation at the ​ Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a nonprofit founded in San Antonio in 1968. MALDEF recently filed two challenges against the state’s new gerrymandered electoral maps, which were redrawn last year, and against Senate Bill 1—the omnibus anti-voting law that caused headaches during early voting in February. In the suits, MALDEF is alleging discrimination against constitutionally protected classes, including Latinos and disabled voters. Perales, who moved to Texas from the East Coast in the…

Stephanie Johnson had never liked her daughter’s volatile second husband, Shaun Hardy. But she didn’t know how dangerous he was until six weeks after the couple’s 2015 divorce, when her daughter messaged to say he’d just beaten and strangled her. “I thought he was going to kill me,” Anne-Christine Johnson, 29, wrote in a Facebook message just after dawn on June 16. “I begged for my life and as soon as he let me up, I ran out of the apartment as fast as I could, barefoot.” The attack had ended around 3 a.m., and she’d hitchhiked to a League City hospital. Shaun, a municipal employee from a prominent local family, hadn’t been arrested, Anne-Christine wrote her mom. In the emergency room, a League City police officer “immediately” observed “dark…

Starting my career as a public school teacher at Austin Independent School District in the middle of COVID-19 wasn’t the best timing on my part. But after a year of remote instruction, meeting with students via Zoom, and lecturing from my home or empty classroom, I was eager to begin teaching face-to-face. I was ready to forge stronger relationships with students, learn classroom management—to be a real teacher. Three months later, I walked away from the profession. When COVID-19 hit in March 2020 and my former job working on a congressional campaign ended, I decided to teach. The desire came from organizing undocumented youth and students, which illuminated a passion for working with young people. I love to help people learn. I always found myself in training roles or showing…

Nancy likes to drive around and look into houses at night. Like snow globes. Like contained landscapes. Look at their lamps, she says of one. Ornate. Or they’ve gone extremely modern, she says of another. Horizontal lines. She wants to see how others live in those gray hours between twilight and sleep when people are their true selves. Too drained for pretense. Settling in front of the TV or exiled to either end of the house to stare into computer screens. Alone. Estranged. Or doing homework at the dining room table with the kids. Or a couple swing dancing under a slowly turning ceiling fan. We started this when we were looking for a house to buy. Let’s see how they’re lived in, Nancy said. So after dark we looked…

Adecade ago, in March 2012, a group of writers, artists, educators, and activists banded together to combat the deplorable actions of Arizona’s state legislature. The state’s lawmakers had recently passed a bill making the teaching of “Ethnic Studies” illegal, along with banning courses that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” and “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.” The bill also created a list of banned books. Of the more than 80 that were eventually added to the list, many of the authors were Black and Latinx. The Arizona law was so restrictive that it made news here in Texas, where we created the Librotraficante Movement in order to highlight the attack on books, educators, and education by conservative politicians. Librotraficante means “book smuggler,”…

EL PASO The Desoto Hotel, an allegedly haunted building constructed in El Paso in 1905, has gone up in flames. Weekly ghost tours were held, and the place has been featured on TV shows concerning paranormal events, KISS FM reports. Facebook commenters said the fire’s flames looked like a skull; some went so far as to say they resembled serial killer Richard Ramirez, who had previously stayed at the hotel. No one was hurt in the fire; a cause has not yet been determined. LUBBOCK The owner of a locally renowned car wants the public to pay for it to be repaired, KLBK reports. The black Lincoln Town Car is adorned with a decal reading “Cocaine and Hookers” and for that simple reason has become something of a Lubbock institution. A…

On a concrete pillar beneath an overpass in a gentrifying part of East Austin, someone has written in bright-orange spray paint: “Bad place to camp or do drugs—Leave.” It’s one of few reminders, aside from some orange syringe caps, that a community of the unhoused lived here for much of last year. In late August, under threat of citation or arrest, the destitute campers were flushed out by police and city contractors. Many gathered what they could and simply shuffled to a park across the street. They pitched their tents—a shred of privacy and shelter from the elements—and resumed surviving. Three months later, the cops and cleaning crews arrived again; the unhoused dutifully dispersed, some to a nearby strip of land between a railroad track and a poultry company, where…

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